Marcela Borge

We are excited to announce Marcela Borge as a 2016-17 TLT Fellow, whom we’ll be working with throughout the next year to explore how online group process data can be used to create meaningful social learning experiences for students. Marcela has an extensive background in computer-supported collaborative learning, human-computer interaction, and design-based research, having published, presented, and received grants in these areas.

The goal of my TLT Fellowship is to develop online technologies and faculty development programs to help faculty and students understand, monitor, and improve the quality of social learning environments. In doing so we can make high quality collaborative learning environments more accessible to online and resident students and become leaders in the field of computer supported collaborative learning and social analytics.

As active learning and collaborative learning pedagogies continue to grow in use across Penn State, this project represents a great opportunity to provide a technology platform that can help students be better collaborators and team members. In nearly every discipline, the ability to work collaboratively with others is critical, as the majority of our students will find themselves in positions that require collaboration when they enter the workforce. One challenge with such a system is scale; we know that monitoring and providing feedback on teamwork and collaborative proejcts takes a great deal of an instructor’s time. Marcela has experience in this area, working on a grant with collaborators from Carnegie Mellon on automated assessment.

The main aim of the grant was to see if we could find a way to automate assessment of collaborative activity in order to test the extent to which different technological designs could help students to improve the quality of collective discourse. Findings from this research indicated that there are patterns of communication that may predict team performance and sophistication of collective cognition.

Marcela has created and tested a prototype system, called CREATE, with positive results related to student learning and social connections. We look forward to working with Marcela to expand the prototype in terms of functionality, make the technology more widely available, and integrate the technology more closely with Canvas.